MIT Running a Ripple Validator

Apr 12, 2016 | David Patterson

Image: MIT

We’re excited to share that Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Connection Science, a research initiative that applies data and analytics to build better societies, is running a validator for the Ripple Consensus Ledger, making it the first academic institution in North America to participate in a global Byzantine consensus database.

Our Ripple validators are lightweight systems that are equivalent to running an email server. The technology has been deployed through real-money pilots with 30 different banks around the world, and we recently closed 20 million ledgers, in comparison to Bitcoin — which has closed about 400,000 blocks. In three years of production, our network has never lost or reversed a single transaction.

This new experiment, led by Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland and Managing Director David Shrier, will take MIT’s experiential research approach to blockchain and provide new opportunities to test and deploy data applications and research.

We’re thrilled to have a globally renowned institution like MIT contribute to the consensus process on Ripple. It not only fortifies the resiliency and security of the network, but also allows us to work with a partner who shares our mission of enabling money to move like information does on the web today.